Henrik Ibsen’s deployment of economics as a root for dramatic tension makes his work entirely apropos in the age of recession. Without even needing to push the text into the realm of allegory, any story of fiduciary mismanagement and the confrontation of ethical responsibility for moral evasion has to belong on the Irish stage.

Second Age Theatre Company’s presentation of A Doll’s House certainly brims with a sense of the importance of money troubles not as a loose symbol of social class but a real, living force at the core of the moral conundrums its characters face, but its sense of focus ends there. This is a woolly production dogged by an uncertainty in presentation that makes for a confusing and seemingly self-defeating interpretation of the text.

The plot follows Nora Helmer (Lisa Lambe) on her trajectory towards psychic and economic liberation as the truth about a secret private loan she has taken out from moneylender Nils Krogstad (Peter Hanly) threatens to come out when her husband Torvald (Peter Gaynor) is promoted at the bank where both men work. The revelation, not only of Nora’s debt but the shady grounds on which it was acquired, could destroy their lives. The question, of course, is what exactly would be destroyed and why? What is the value of this life: materially and spiritually?

The core text is strong enough and Paul Larkin’s translation linguistically clear enough so that the basic story remains communicative, centering on how socioeconomic and cultural-environmental frameworks can constrain, confine, or define the individual. However, the seeming relocation of the setting from 1870s Norway to an uncertain but definitely later time period, the inclusion of Irish-accented servants (throwing geographical and cultural framing to the winds), and a desperately uneven sense of ensemble characterisation leave the production wobbling. There is enough precision in Ibsen to sustain numerous subtle and explicit nuances, but the overall sense of the applicability of the text, its actual meaning in this rendering, is lost when seemingly ungrounded interpretative choices become distractions.

Lisa Lambe holds the centre of this unsteady ship with consistency, but her characterisation isn’t gripping. Though she conveys a sense of nervy bliss bordering on hysteria, her Nora is considerably less sympathetic in her desperation than she needs to be. She seems more on the edge of collapse from the get-go than is wise, as if her level of self-deception is much lower than the climactic transformation suggests. You get no sense of genuine naivety here, merely an affectation of it, and the result is frustration as you wait for her to drop the act. In contrast, Peter Gaynor’s Torvald is much too broad to even touch on psychological realism, and by the time he reaches his chilling climactic attack on Nora, there is no sense of danger, dread, unease, or even disgust: he’s just a buffoon that was always going to get his just desserts.

Peter Hanly fares much better as Krogstad, conveying a sense of creepy correctness that makes his early scenes very effective in increasing tension. But the turning-point conversation between Krogstad and former flame Christine (Mary Kelly) goes horribly awry because Kelly’s largely one-note, frowning portrayal of the character means the scene is impossible to read emotionally. Christine’s dilemma may echo Nora’s, particularly in terms of the economic situation of the independent female, but the character is played without dimension, meaning that her true motives are smothered. If she’s manipulating everyone, including Nora and Krogstad, as cynically as her situation would seem to demand and Kelly’s determined face suggests, then this scene fundamentally undermines the significance of Nora’s story, because here we have a foreshadowing of the resolution Nora needs - a self-determined choice by an independent woman seasoned by experience - and it is the opposite of what Nora purports to seek by leaving Torvald. Is Nora doomed to come back and become Christine? That’s how it reads when this scene plays as it does, and that can’t be right, can it?

Sabine Dargent’s wood-frame set may be eminently portable for what is a touring production, but the see-through house does nothing for the execution of the piece. On the contrary, it seems to sabotage whatever sound design Denis Clohessy had in mind. Dialogue ‘inside’ the house isn’t always audible because there’s nothing for it to bounce off and, in spite of Stanford’s attempts to move his cast around and block things out with some sense of sonic equilibrium, at one point or other you are not going to be able to hear one side of a conversation clearly. When characters stand behind or beside the main room (so, outside the wood frame) their voices are swallowed up by the strange velvet curtain hanging behind them. When this curtain is dramatically dropped to the floor at the conclusion, presumably symbolising the collapse of the Helmer household, it’s not so much a clinching moment as an ‘oh right, so that’s why it was there’ effect. When issues like this begin to occupy your mind, you know the production has lost you, and that’s a shame.

Harvey O’Brien is a writer and critic, and lectures in Film Studies at University College Dublin.